Friday, June 3, 2011

Amazon, Microsoft Cloud Outages No Reason To Avoid Cloud Services

Amazon, Microsoft Cloud Outages No Reason To Avoid Cloud Services

The string of recent cloud outages shouldn't stop solution providers from moving toward cloud computing, several executives said this week at Ingram Micro (NYSE:IM)'s Cloud Services Summit in Phoenix.Instead, cloud outages suffered by Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) and others reinforce the importance of rock solid SLAs and cloud systems that are designed for failure.

"New technology is a tough sport; I call it a full-contact sport," said Ingram Micro CIO Mario Leone. "If you're not ready to accept that you're going to have some issues along the way, you're not ready." Amazon Web Services suffered a massive cloud outage in April, a major hiccup that knocked some Amazon cloud customers offline for days. Following Amazon's cloud outage, Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) was hit with a trio of outages that caused delays and downtime for Exchange cloud e-mail.Those outages put cloud computing environments under a microscope and called into question the reliability and performance of cloud. But several industry experts said the cloud outages shouldn't thwart solution provider cloud plans.

Gartner analyst Tiffani Bova said the fallout from Amazon's outage can be chalked up to poor planning, and is not an indication that the cloud as a whole is unreliable."It's not that on-prem is perfect and cloud is flawed," she said. "IT is flawed."

According to Bova, customers that were hit hardest by recent cloud outages didn't design for failure and have the systems in place to survive and outage. Many Amazon customers that were hit hardest during Amazon's cloud outage did not have failover or redundancy in place.